Workshop Speakers, Chairs and Panellists
Jacqueline Minor is Head of the European Commission’s Representation
in the UK. A lawyer by training, she began her career in the European
Institutions at the Court of Justice in 1984. She moved to the European
Commission three years later to work on the recognition of diplomas and
later enjoyed a second spell at the Court working as referendaire to the
British judges Gordon Slynn and David Edward. Returning to the
Commission in 1992, she spent 16 years in the Directorate-General responsible for the
Internal Market, heading, successively, the units responsible for the regulated professions,
policy co-ordination and resources. Promoted to the position of director in 2003, she was
responsible for the knowledge economy (including intellectual and industrial property
regulation) and for horizontal policy development, participating for example on the
Commission's Single Market Review in 2007. In April 2008, Jacqueline Minor became the
Director for Consumer Policy (at DG-SANCO).
Shaun Breslin is Professor of Politics and International Studies
at the University of Warwick, Director of the Centre for the Study
of Globalisation and Regionalisation, and Senior Scientist for the
European Commission FP7 funded project ‘Global Re-ordering:
Evolution through European Networks’ (GR:EEN). He is
Associate Fellow of the Asia Research Centre based at Murdoch
University, an Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme at Chatham House, and Adjunct
Professor at Monash University in Melbourne. Shaun has published extensively on the role
of China in international relations and the global economy, comparative governance,
regionalism and South East Asia, and the global crisis. He is Co-Editor of the Pacific Review,
Editor of the Warwick Series on Globalisation and Regionalisation with Routledge, and CoEditor of the Global Reordering Pivot Series with Palgrave. His own recent books include
China and the Global Political Economy, and a co-edited forthcoming volume with Sage
entitled China and the World.
Roundtable 1: The EU and Global Trade Policy
Lord Hannay of Chiswick, GCMG, CH, is a long serving British diplomat
having held various positions in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in
London since 1959. From 1984 until 1985, he was a Minister at the British
Embassy in Washington, DC. He was then promoted to Ambassador and
Permanent Representative to the European Economic Community, a post
he held from 1985 until 1990. From 1990 until 1995 he served as
Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
Between 1996 and 2003, he served as the Special Representative for
Cyprus and in December 2004 was a member of the UN High Level Panel
on Threats, Challenges and Change, reporting to the Secretary-General. Lord Hannay was
introduced to the House of Lords in 2001.
Denis Redonnet heads the Strategy division in the Directorate
General for Trade in the European Commission, after heading up
its WTO division. Before that, he served as Deputy chief of staff
to EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and advisor to EU
Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy. He is a career European
Commission official, having held positions in the monetary,
international economic affairs and internal market directorate
generals of the EU Executive. He is an economist by training, and started his career as a
corporate banker for a French bank in the city of London.
Michael Moore is the Member of Parliament for Berwickshire, Roxburgh,
and Selkirk. Before becoming an MP, Michael qualified as a Scottish
chartered accountant and worked for Coopers & Lybrand in Edinburgh.
From May 2010 to October 2013, Michael held the post of Secretary of
State for Scotland as part of the Coalition Government. Following this, he
was appointed as advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister on Europe and
Business. He recently published a report entitled ‘Doing Business Across
Europe’ which outlines the strong support from UK businesses for
remaining in the EU while ensuring that the UK takes a lead on EU reform
to make it more agile, less bureaucratic and more competitive.
Megan Dee is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for the
Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick.
She joined the Centre in 2013 as part of the European Commission FP-7
funded project ‘Global Reordering: Evolution through European
Networks’ (GR:EEN). She has a PhD in Politics and an MSc in
International Politics from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She also
has over seven years of policy and parliamentary experience working in
the Scottish political system. Megan’s current research addresses the
changing role and performance of the EU in global trade governance. She has published
widely on the topic of EU performance in multilateral negotiations, and has a book
forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan on the topic of ‘The European Union in a Multipolar
World: Emerging Roles and the WTO’.
Roundtable 2: The EU and energy security
Baroness Scott of Needham Market is a member of the House of
Lords EU Select Committee as well as Chair of the EU sub-committee
on Agriculture, Fisheries, Environment and Energy. Made a life peer in
2000, Lady Scott previously served as a Councillor for district and
county councils in Suffolk between 1991 and 2005. She has served in
organisations including the LGA transport executive and the Audit
Commission. From 2008 to 2011 she was Party President of the Liberal
Democrats.
Andrew Janis Folkmanis is a principal administrator in the European
Commission Directorate-General for Energy, with responsibility for
Horizon 2020 and the SET (Strategic Energy Technologies) Plan, the
EU's tool for targeting R&D funds to energy priorities. Born and
educated in the UK, as an engineer and economist, Folkmanis spent
the earlier part of his career as a specialist consultant in large systems
development, mainly for high-tech projects, in the UK and Germany. His
previous posts include Adviser to the President of Latvia (2003-2007),
Head of Energy at the Council of Baltic Sea States, responsibility for
BASREC (Baltic Sea Regional Energy Cooperation) (2003-2006), and Senior Adviser at
Turquoise Associates (2010-2012).
Tim Abraham was appointed Head of European Policy at the newly
created Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in January
2009 having previously been Director of EU Energy Policy at the
Department of Business. He is responsible for the EU and bilateral
European aspects of the UK’s energy and climate change policy. He
previously held a number of posts within the Department of Trade and
Industry most recently as Director, International Trade Strategy; and
Director, EU Enlargement during the accession process of the Central
and Eastern European Member States.
Nick Sitter is Professor of Public Policy at Central European
University in Budapest and the BI Norwegian Business School in
Oslo, and Research Associate at LSE Centre for Analysis of Risk
and Regulation. Before obtaining his PhD from the LSE, he worked
as a political consultant in the gas industry. His research interests
include European integration, regulatory politics and EU energy
markets, as well as party politics, terrorism and civil war. Nick Sitter
is the lead researcher on the CEU GR:EEN team, and has contributed to Work Package 5
on Energy and Environment and Work Package 4 on Human Rights and Security. His work
on energy policy for the GR:EEN project has been published in several journals and edited
books, including the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of European
Integration. He is the co-author, with Andreas Goldthau, of A Liberal Actor in A Realist
World: The EU Regulatory State and the Global Political Economy of Energy (Oxford
University Press, forthcoming 2015).
Roundtable 3: The EU and Global Tax Policy
Avinash Persaud is Chairman of Intelligence Capital Ltd.. Previously he
was managing director and Global Head of Research at State Street
Bank, the world's largest institutional investor, (1999-2003) and Global
Head of Currency and Commodity Research at J.P. Morgan Co.(19931999). He was ranked within the top 3 of currency analysts in major
international investor surveys between 1992 and 1999. Professor
Persaud is Co-Chair of the OECD Emerging Market Network. He is the
economic expert on the UK Government's Advisory Panel on Public
Sector Information. Professor Persaud has published widely in academic
and professional journals including International Finance, Oxford Review
of Economic Policy, Central Banking and the Financial Regulator, and his work has
appeared in the financial press including the The Economist and BusinessWeek.
Heinz Zourek is Director General in the European Commission's
Directorate General on Taxes and Customers Union (DG TAXUD). Before
this he was in DG Enterprise and Industry, from May 2001 as Deputy
Director General and as of November 2005 as Director General. He
started to work in the European Commission in September 1995 as
Deputy Director General in the Directorate General for the Internal Market.
From 1993 to 1995 Heinz Zourek was a member of the College of the
EFTA Surveillance Authority created by the Agreement on the European
Economic Area (EEA). His portfolio contained state aids and monopolies,
public procurement and free movement of persons. Between 1990 and
1993 he worked for the Confederation of Austrian Trade Unions as Director of the Economic
Policy Department.
Richard Murphy is a UK chartered accountant. He was senior partner of
a practicing firm and director of a number of entrepreneurial companies
before becoming one of the founders of the Tax Justice Network in 2002.
He now directs Tax Research UK and writes, broadcasts and blogs
extensively. Richard is widely credited with creating the country-by-country
reporting concept and has been credited with creating much of the debate
on tax gaps in the UK and Europe. He also defined the term ‘secrecy
jurisdictions’, now widely used in debates on offshore. Richard has been a
visiting or research fellow at a number of UK universities and is joint
author of 'Tax Havens, The True Story of Globalisation',
(Cornell University Press, 2010) and author of ‘The Courageous State', Searching Finance
(2011) and ‘Over here and under taxed: the story of Google, Amazon and Starbucks’
(Vintage Books, 2013). He is now writing ‘The Joy of Tax’ due to be published in March 2015
by Transworld.
Len Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and
Economic Sociology at the Department of Business and Politics at the
Copenhagen Business School. He is also Professor of International
Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at
the University of Warwick, and a former Director of Studies for the Warwick
Commission on International Financial Reform (2009-10). Seabrooke is the
author of U.S. Power in International Finance (Palgrave, 2001) and The
Social Sources of Financial Power (Cornell University Press, 2006).
Seabrooke currently holds a grant from the European Research Council for a project titled
'Professions in International Political Economies'. He is also the Principal Investigator for
Work Package One on 'European Actor-Networks' in the 'Global Reordering: Evolution
through European Networks' project. Seabrooke is a Senior Editor of International Studies
Quarterly, the flagship journal of the International Studies Association.
Roundtable 4: Integration, Devolution, and Regional Leadership
Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, KT, GCMG, became a member of the House
of Lords in 1992. A distinguished British diplomat, Lord Wilson spent
the majority of his career in the Far East and rose to become the
penultimate British Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Hong Kong
(1987-92). Lord Wilson is Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen in
Scotland, a former President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a
former Board Member of the British Council. Lord Wilson is currently
serving as a member of the EU Select Committee.
Andrew Bradley heads the Office of the International Institute
for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) to
the EU in Brussels. He joined the senior management of the
Institute in Stockholm, Sweden during May 2010 as the Director
of Global Programmes. He was previously the Assistant
Secretary-General for Political Affairs and Human Development
of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States.
Prior to that, he was a diplomat and served in South African Embassies and Missions in
Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. In this capacity, he participated in the negotiations for
South Africa’s accession to the ACP Group and the Lomé Convention (now Cotonou
Agreement), and acted as member of the South African Negotiating Team for the South
Africa-EU Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA).
Lord Purvis of Tweed is Chair of the All-Party Group on Reform,
Decentralisation, and Devolution in the United Kingdom. Before joining
the Lords in 2013, Jeremy Purvis was a Member of the Scottish
Parliament for Tweeddale, Ettrick & Lauderdale. He was the first MSP
to publish full proposals for the devolution of further tax powers to the
Scottish Parliament in 2004, then proposed the establishment of the
Steel Commission and served as a member of it. After his terms in the
Scottish Parliament Jeremy Purvis developed and lead proposals for
further reform to progress more home rule for Scotland: Devo Plus. He
is also a board member of the think tank Reform Scotland
Luk Van Langenhove is Director of the United Nations University
Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) in
Bruges. Before he was Deputy Secretary-General of the Belgian
Federal Ministry of Science Policy, Deputy Chief of Cabinet of the
Belgian Federal Minister of Science Policy and a researcher and
lecturer at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). From 2006 until
2010 he acted as Vice-President of the International Social Sciences
Council. Luk Van Langenhove has published widely on regional
integration, social sciences theory, positioning theory and psychology. Recent books
include De Opmars van de Regio's (Die Keure, 2014), Building Regions (Ashgate,
2011), People and Societies (Routledge, 2010) and Innovating the Social Sciences
(Passagen Verlag, 2007).